C’est magnifique, and as world leaders gather in Paris today we say merci mon Dieu for Notre-Dame and other phoenixes from the flames.
Notre-Dame de Paris (Our Lady of Paris) is the very spiritual soul of the French capital and said to house Christ’s crown of thorns.
As well as Quasimodo!
Of course, it is always a cause for celebration when God’s children raise themselves up.
After fire has razed their churches.
And so we will be rejoicing in Notre Dame’s grand reopening, nearly six years after an electrical fault caused it to burn.
And giving a thought to other great buildings that have been rebuilt from embers to stand ever taller than before.
The buildings that wouldn’t die
The Frauenkirche, Dresden, Germany: Now while Notre Dame and our other prized buildings were gutted by fate.
The pride of Dresden was flattened in war.
Before the good people of the Saxon city, the Florence of the Elbe, rebuilt their Renaissance city.\
Brick for brick, mural for mural as it was before it was firebombed.
Bosnia’s National Library, Sarajevo: The 19th-century National Library sits proudly on the Milijacka river.
And unbeknown to visitors its current iteration is less than 30 years old.
It had housed some two million books, old scripts, photos and transcripts before the Serbs bombed the heck out of it.
The White House, Washington DC: And isn’t it apt that it was an Irish-American, James Hoban, who rebuilt the US presidential residence.
After their previous overlords had burned it down in the Second War of Independence in 1812.
In the midst of the Napoleonic Wars.
St Paul’s Cathedral, London: The highest-profile casualty of the Great Fire in London.
St Paul’s has in fact been in the wars itself over its 1,300-year history.
Burned four times before that 1666 tragedy, hit by lightning and the Blitzkrieg .
It has survived all of that to be the church of choice for British Royal family weddings.
Il Teatro La Fenice, Venice: And we’ll finish on a centrepiece of the city on the lagoon which literally means The Phoenix.
The opera house has been destroyed by fire three times, the last arson, before reopening in 2003.
Our prayers answered
So give up a prayer for all these and other great buildings.
As we mark Notre-Dame and other phoenixes from the flames this weekend.
